Monday, 14 November 2011

Perhaps an Occupy movement in a place like Second Life does not make sense, Occupy is about people who normally contact online coming to together in the real world to effect real changes. But this site is s good source of information.

Friday, 11 November 2011

I would not feel comfortable showing you what goes on inside this SIM. The long distance shot is perfect, the people who made this SIM has good reason to seek out privacy.

I am no prude in Second Life. Consenting adults have the right to create what ever kind of pornographic performances they agree to. Lets be honest, porn is very big on the Internet and Second Life helps people produce more interactive porn outside of the control of a production house or concerns of human trafficing or exploitation that dog online porn.

But there is a great deal of lurid attachment projected in to Second Life's space from the fantasy space of thousands of users. In this way Second Life becomes a kind of shared dream space, a collective fantasy where the more primal desires of many users get played out.

In this way SL engages users in their fantasy lives, while TV on the other hand tends to distance people. We all have guilty TV shows we like. I love to watch Sex in the City and 16 and Pregnant because I hate them so much. We project emotions and desires in to TV and in this way we consume our own desires, we thus get the illusion of detachment from our desires. Second Life on the other hand allows us to act out our desires, which mean we can't disown them and sometimes are forced to confess that the desires being acted out our our own.

The fact that bondage shemales on a beach have such a interesting and well execute SIM shows you how Second Life's virtual world is evolving outside of the media spotlight. Long gone is the ugly virtual suburbs of endless ads. Uncool Second Life is developing in to a rich complex environment.

Though this can be read as more proof of the fall of Virtual Worlds as a viable business, and there is some of that in this, it can also be taken as proof of the rise of the overall virtual worlds market offering more people more options. So a limited number of hard core virtual world users have an ever growing range of options.

Thursday, 3 November 2011

Sometimes a very simple implementation of an idea brings home just how powerful that idea is. There is a well established idea that building and using virtual worlds can be tools in education. Open University Inspiring Worlds is a fun and easy to use app which illustrates how we construct a world can help us understand what areas we would like to study and explore.

The simplicity of the tool really illustrates who virtual worlds can help us to find areas of interest. Inspiring Worlds lets you build your own world. You can fill this world with various icons and images which you can put in various relationships. The tool will then analyse what you world says about your areas of interest.

This analyse is not the Facebook analyse were seemingly random links are thrown at you out of almost nowhere. The two worlds I created really did reflect my own interests in life long learning. I have taken courses in science, humanities and art, and I have a strong interest in sustainable development.